Shownotes
In reviewing Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I do not intend to offer a sweeping overview of the many alterations Nolan has made to the Homeric epic1. After all, in its protean form, The Odyssey was sung by bards in an oral tradition, which meant that the story was always being made anew. However, what happens when a director embarks upon the voyage of The Odyssey without invoking the Muses? Should divinely inspired poetry be turned into a motion picture? And when does an interpretation sever rather than serve its relationship to the source material? To answer some of these questions, I will focus upon a singular omission in Nolan’s adaptation: the moment Odysseus tricks the Cyclops into believing his name is ‘Nobody’. In the spirit of the bardic tradition, in which no one person holds the definitive meaning of a text, may this essay sit as one amongst many interpretations of the film. A fragment of the whole that offers a glimpse into the spellbinding magic of the oral tradition of Homeric poetry.
Gabriel Stevens
